Festschrift Parret

Festschrift

In: Seduction, Community, Speech Edited by Frank Brisard, Michael Meeuvis and Bat Vandenabeele, John Benjamins, Amsterdam (forthcoming in 2004): 183-196. Wolfgang Wildgen Conceptual innovation in art. Three case studies on Leonardo da Vinci, William Turner, and Henry Moore 1. Semiotic innovation in the art of Leonardo da Vinci In his “Trattato della pittura” Leonardo states that the painter has as his primary aim the representation of two things: man and his mind (“l’uomo e la mente”; Pedretti, 1995: § 180). The nature of man becomes visible and, therefore, accessible to the eye in the different “accidents” and movements and in the proportions of his body parts (cf. Pedretti, 1995: Terza Parte). In order to represent man and his mind the artist must first create a pictorial space, the stage for the topic of the painting. Second he must consider light and shadow in human bodies, the gestures of the hands, the postures of the head and facial expression before he distributes the topics of the painting on the surface. Finally landscape, sky, objects, animals, persons accompanying the topic of the painting (mostly individuals or groups of individuals) must be arranged in space, relative to light and shadow. Leonardo’s art goes beyond mimesis of nature; it divulges the internal meaning of space, of light and shadows to the viewer. The beauty of a scene is the recovered meaning in the mind of the viewer. With the fore-grounding of movement and accident Leonardo requires interpretative activity of the viewer, who, based on his experience, must extrapolate movement and action from an instantaneous picture to a process which has caused it and which will bring it to a proper end later. In bodily movement, any movement of one body-part has a counterpoise in another bodypart. The terms balance, weight and counterpoise have the following meaning in the context of painting: A single body is in balance if the weight of the movement of one part of the body, e.g., the head, has a counterpoise in another, e.g., in the movement of the shoulders or the trunk. The balance could be easily realized if all bodies were static. But this would make them “wooden”, i.e., unanimated. The painter who wants to show the mind of the persons in the scene must show them in movement and the balance of a person or group of persons has to be a dynamic balance.